


Working the Seam

by SylvanWitch



Category: Justified
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:00:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you follow the seam deep underground, you're bound to get to the root of things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Working the Seam

**Author's Note:**

> From lovely Boyd/Raylan prompts by Luthien ("blue") and Oschun ("bound by history").

When the roar of shifting rock growls down to the grumble of secondary falls and he raises a shaking hand to clear his goggles of coal dust, Raylan catches the eyes of the only other miner to make it to the safe room.

 

Boyd’s eyes are gleaming, manic in the pale wash of emergency light that paints their faces blue at the lips and in the thin places, a deathly pallor anywhere the mask and grit let through a hint of skin.

 

Raylan tries not to think of the men he’d had lunch with half an hour ago, but it’s hard not to see Jimmy Lee’s face, filth broken by a wide white grin as he announces that Donna Rae’s pregnant with their first baby.

 

Hard not to remember the way Johnny Boon had grimaced, probably thinking of his own daughter, gone in a custody suit, living with her mama somewhere in Ohio.

 

“Hey,” Boyd says, raspy through the mask, recalling Raylan to the present.

 

“Hey,” he echoes, and the inanity strikes him as funny, his chuff of laughter coming rough out of the mask, falling flat in the narrow space of the safe room.  

 

Boyd’s hand moves toward Raylan’s face, and he has a startled moment of thinking Boyd’s going to rip his mask off when Boyd pulls the air quality meter from the shelf just over Raylan’s head and turns it on, fingers fumbling with the little buttons in his heavy work gloves.

 

The machine beeps, and Boyd holds up the display, which tells them both that they can pull off the stifling masks and breathe the free air, just as soon as the rock dust settles some.  

 

Raylan nods, feeling a degree of control slipping into his bones; he hates the mask and goggles, hates seeing the world through the distorted plexiglass.  

 

After the masks are off, they take a long moment to assess each other, eyes searching out the hollowed cheekbones, gaunt in the thin blue light, and the shadowed spaces under the eyes, the hints of fear carefully conserved, held back against a moment when they might need to let it go.

 

Fear means they’re alive.  Fear means they’ve got a chance of getting out of this pit.

 

Boyd sets the air quality instrument to monitor their status, holds up a naked hand at the roof of the room to test for drafts while Raylan does the same along the floor.

 

They stand up and shake their heads at the same time, turn in unison toward the caged oxygen tanks taking up half the area in the room.  

 

“Supposed to be enough for four men for three days,” Boyd observes.

 

Raylan snorts.  “You figure anyone’s checked ‘em lately?”

 

Impelled by the same thought, they lean in together to read the nearly illegible initials scrawled on the smudged surface of the safety maintenance chart.

“EM?” Raylan asks hopefully, squinting to see in the diffuse light.

 

“Nah,” Boyd answers.  “FM.”

 

“Shit.”

 

“Fuck,” Boyd agrees.

 

Frank Markham is the biggest fuck-up on the night crew and doesn’t do anything without a boss breathing down his neck.  Chances are he didn’t even open the cage, much less actually check to make sure the tanks weren’t defective.

 

Sharing a speaking look, they put the cage at their backs and slide down to the floor.  Boyd fits alright, but Raylan has to bend his knees some.  Already, he can feel the pressure against the joints and knows he’s not going to be able to sit here for long.

 

Boyd’s hand on his knee could be taken as a casual bid for Raylan’s attention or as one friend reassuring another, but there’s a history between them, something that’s bound them together for years, maybe forever, something between the Givenses and the Crowders that runs to destiny and other shit Raylan tries hard not to believe in.

 

And this isn’t the first occasion on which Boyd’s touched him with intent.

 

Drunken fumblings on the sharp shale that lines the shelf beach at the quarry and sloppy blow jobs in the back of Boyd’s daddy’s pickup aren’t the same thing, Raylan thinks, feeling the weight of Boyd’s hand, innocent enough on his clothed knee but somehow heavier than any touch they’ve ever shared before.

 

Fifteen and fucked up hadn’t been a good look on either of them, but they’d spared what they had salvaged of their respective dignities by forgetting.

 

Or so he’d thought.

 

“Uh, Boyd,” Raylan begins, but Boyd’s hand squeezing just above the knee, ticklish zing of it shooting through the base of his spine and into his belly, effectively shuts Raylan up.

 

“Ain’t no reason we gotta sit here worryin’ over somethin’ we cain’t change,” Boyd offers, and damned if he  hasn’t got the devil on his tongue, like it used to be when they were younger and he was suggesting something dangerous, his shit-eating grin lighting his face up like a flare had gone off on the ground between them.

 

Now, Raylan isn’t looking at his friend, but he can hear the grin anyway.  It makes the washed out air around them somehow brighter.

 

Raylan shakes his head at his sentimentality and tries to adjust his half-hard dick without making it obvious.

 

Impossible, of course, when they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh.

 

Boyd’s hand shifts to Raylan’s inseam.  

 

“Gonna let me help you with that?”

 

“Boyd…”

 

“Raylan,” and somehow the two syllables manage to convey amusement, fondness, derision and challenge all at a time.  Not for the first time Raylan considers that Boyd is almost as dangerous when he opens his mouth as he is when he’s blowing something up.

 

“Yeah, alright,” he concedes, scrunching down a little so his knees fall open, giving Boyd better access to the fly of his coveralls.

 

Raylan closes his eyes against the first cold intrusion of mine air as Boyd delves into his shorts and then the sudden searing heat of Boyd’s grip, callused and confident, which makes Raylan shudder out a long breath that only just manages to sidestep a whine.

 

Boyd’s thumb slides rough over the head of Raylan’s cock and Raylan does whine then, a sound from back in his throat that might be mistaken for panic in another man.

 

He reaches blindly, eyes still tight closed, as if not seeing it means it ain’t happening, to let his fingers outline Boyd’s cock, pressed hard and tight beneath the denim.  His fingers stutter in their quest for the metal of Boyd’s zipper when Boyd polishes Raylan’s cock with the palm of his hand, and Raylan’s hips jutter up against the pressure.

 

He bounces his head off the cage, raising a faint ringing in the close room, and resumes his exploration until he has Boyd’s cock heavy in his own work-hardened grip.

 

After that, it doesn’t take much for them to fall into a frantic rhythm, their panting breaths and gasps of pleasure broken now and again by a bitten off word that might be, “Just—“ or could be, “Jesus,” either about par for the course when it’s like this between them.

 

Raylan feels his pleasure building, tries to hold it back, pressure growing behind his closed eyes, blood thundering like an avalanche behind his ears.  His heart jumps against the rails of his ribs as the heavy, almost painful strength of his orgasm explodes out of him, bowing him in an arc, heels pushing against the heavy metal door of the safe room, savage cry—maybe denial, probably love—ripped from him as he shudders and shudders and shudders down into a sticky, post-coital slump.

 

He only remembers the important work his hand had been doing when he feels Boyd shifting restlessly beneath it, the cooling evidence of his release and the stench of their mingled spunk at last cracking Raylan’s eyes open to squint into the blue half-light and roll his head until he can take in Boyd’s face.

 

“Okay?” Raylan croaks, taking in Body’s satisfied sprawl and the swell of his lower lip, obviously bitten between his teeth when he came.  

 

Boyd’s answer is a laugh, wicked and rich, that rockets through Raylan like an aftershock, making his hips jerk.  

 

“Not up for another go-round already?” Boyd asks, but there’s nothing sneering in the question.  In fact, his tone is almost gentle, and Raylan has to resist another shiver.

 

“Give me twenty,” he offers, answering kindness with kindness, looking Boyd right in the eyes when he says it.

 

He knows he’s got a promise on his face, sees the second Boyd recognizes it, too, and then watches, with a dismay he’ll later deny (forever if he has to) as the look morphs into the devil-may-care expression that is the genetic inheritance of all the Crowder boys.

 

“Don’t think we’ve got it,” Boyd says then, and Raylan’s eyes go automatically to the readout panel on the air quality meter. Still in the green.

 

His confusion must show because Boyd says, “Listen.”

 

Raylan does as he’s told, holding his breath, and hears, after an eternity of silence, a distant but definite metallic tapping, audible even over the sluggish churning of his still-riled blood.

 

He looks at Boyd again, sees that he’s busy putting himself to rights, does the same with the kind of mechanical precision he usually employs to take his mind off the important things.

 

When they’re squared away and standing again, Raylan’s knees just a little shaky, Body’s eyes maybe a little wilder at the corners, they wait facing the safety door, careful to keep a distance between them.

 

They don’t talk.

 

Raylan listens to Boyd breathing, listens until they’re breathing in synch.  And it’s ironic, given Boyd’s perennial screed, that it’s Raylan who can’t keep quiet.

 

When the tap-tap-tapping has grown closer, when by straining he thinks he can make out voices as through a layer of the world’s armor, Raylan hazards, “What do you think they’ll do with this room?”

 

Boyd’s shrug is audible, a susurrus of fabric in the cold, still air.

 

“Seam’s nearly tapped here anyway,” he observes, like they’re talking about the weather and not Boyd’s livelihood.  For Raylan this has always been a stop on the way to something else, but he knows that for Boyd it might be his last chance at not living forever in his family’s shadow.

 

“Probably close it off after they’ve gotten us out.”

 

“So no one’ll ever see this room again?”

 

“What’re you gettin’ at, Raylan Givens?”  Boyd’s flirtatious tone is at odds with his eyes, which are as serious as Raylan’s ever seen them.

 

“Just seems a shame that we’re gonna bury this too.”

 

Boyd’s snort is bitter.  “Somethin’ you want to share with the boys when we get up top?  Maybe make a declaration of some kind?”

 

The mocking tone is unmistakably intended to start something.

 

Raylan shrugs it off, but he can feel his lips curl into a sneer when he answers.

 

“Think I can remember it just fine without tellin’ anyone else about it.”

 

“That’s what I thought,” Boyd answers, as if Raylan had disappointed him.

 

“Look, Boyd—.”

 

“No, Givens, you look:  I ain’t fooled by your sudden interest.  There ain’t nothin’ keepin’ you in Harlan that you ain’t already decided you’re willin’ to give up.  Go if you’re goin’, but don’t make me an accomplice to it if you’re fixin’ to break someone’s heart.”

 

And that shocks Raylan out of whatever stupor had held him still until that point.  He turns and gives Boyd a shove, bouncing his shoulder off the near wall and pinning him to the rock with both hands at his shoulders.  Black dust shifts down around them, and Raylan has a ridiculous urge to look at the ceiling to make sure it’s going to hold.

 

Under his hands, Boyd is struggling, but Raylan’s got the advantage, and though the Crowders have fought dirty since the first of them salted the springs of nearby settlers to drive them away, in this instance Boyd doesn’t seem to have the energy to fight.

 

“What do you want?” he asks, turning to stone under Raylan’s grip, making Raylan cold with the steady regard of his dark eyes.

 

“I want—,” Raylan starts, but he’s interrupted with a shout, close enough that they can make out words.

 

“Here!” Boyd hollers, dipping from beneath Raylan’s suddenly slack hands and taking a half-stride toward the door, where he pounds against it with the flat of his hand.  “We’re here!”

 

“Hang tight!” a muffled voice answers.

 

Boyd slaps his hand twice against the door in answer and then stays there, hand bracing himself on the cold metal, head down.

 

Raylan risks a hand on his shoulder, feels the wiry muscles bunch and release beneath his palm.

 

“I’m sorry,” he starts to say, and he is, for so many, many things, some of them beyond his control, many of them inherited and that he’s helpless to escape.

 

“Yeah,” Boyd answers, breathing out once, hard, from his nose.  “Yeah,” he says again, standing upright.  “Me, too.”

 

As the safety door gives a first, promising wail, tugged open from the outside, Raylan says, “Take care, Boyd.”

 

Maybe it’s a warning for the present moment, but it feels a lot more like a way of saying goodbye.

 

Boyd turns to look at him once more before the gap at the door is wide enough to allow his smaller frame through first.

 

“Don’t come back here,” he says.  They both know he’s not talking only about the mine.

 

Raylan nods, holds a hand up against the sudden glare of brilliant white light piercing the blue gloom of their sanctuary, driving away the last sense of safety he’ll ever find and casting Boyd’s face into darkness.

 

“No promises,” he answers, and escapes.


End file.
